Just for fun then, I guess I will answer these... in a very over technical way. Just incase this is homework, basically to a degree where any lecturer or teacher would smell the stink of cheating 5 miles off.

Well RAM itself is an array of capicitors, These work via holding a potential difference. Capicitors work by having dual coils that hold opposing eleterical charges to most effeciently hold a potential difference.

the capicitors in RAM itself are small and basic so they don't effectively hold a charge effectively for long periods of time, this is opposed to flash memory (also used in solid state hard drives) that uses the similar priniples but are able to hold their potential difference for vastly longer ammounts of time. As a result RAM is volatile memory.

It keeps that data within the capicitors as given within the previous. You'd have to phrase this question much better for a better response.

There is no "specific" ammount of space a program is given as a program may not know how much memory it will need, a program is able to reserve memory however, memory limits and allocation are handled by the kernel, the kernel is also responsible for the maximum limitation of RAM that single process or application can have, this is more noticable in windows then linux and more noticable on servers then desktop. Certain OSs and certain Development Platforms contain garbage collectors that are responsible for finding memory no longer in use and freeing up resources, an example of such a platform would be Java.

Really depends on situtation, a generic copy will go via RAM, however more specific cases may not, in the case of rebuilding a RAID array, this will be handled via the raid controller, in a hardware raid this will not require the usage of RAM for any part of the transfer process. This question relies on exactly what the conditions of the transfer between the drives are and how the drives are mounted exactly.

Hi,

Please include a transistor for each capacitor within the cell for the array.

'DRAM' Dynamic Random Access Memory must be refreshed before the cell decays below the stored charge. The transistor is used to control the charge on the cell's capacitor. 'SRAM' Static Random Access Memory has 4 transistors typically too store the memory cell information and does not require a refresh but does require power to retain the storage settings. 'SRAM' density is not as great as 'DRAM'.


The cell charge is controlled by the transistor.

I was not excusing anything. There is nothing wrong with a person asking questions to a community to help them in their quest for knowledge. However the issue resides in the fact of how the question is framed. For example, I have an issue with writing to a text file in vi. I tried to read how to get around it for 2 hours, but that was not my assignment. I had to write a shell script and once finished I tried to save and close it, but couldn't.

Should I have refrained from asking for help because of some ill conceived idea that you have that says I am cheating? I do not think so. Although if I ask you how to write the shell script, how to save it, and how to close it there is an issue.

Give people some slack, not everybody is as gifted in this area of IT as you. I am sure that your contributions are to both further the OS and the people interested in it. Right?

Just a couple of thoughts.

Blessings,
Shaun

Hi,

If indeed someone is attempting to extend their knowledge then that is a separate thing as compared to someone who posts homework queries. Sure, if someone who has a HW question and presents the problem along with what they have attempted along with questions as to the immediate problem then I may give some aid or slack. That will depend on the composition presented.

But to pass forum queries as the HW solution doesn't gain that same person any knowledge. Heck, Frat 'crib' storage files have got many students through University but did that enhance their Knowledge? NO! As for questions or non-HW that's not the issue. I've done my share of assisting and will continue while I can. But I will continue to be against anyone who encourages the cheating on HW, testing or just un-ethical things of this sort.

Enough said by me on this issue.

Meh, Years since I have looked into this stuff... =P. But anyways, lovely little things capacitors.... what would we do without them...

Come on guys, it took longer for you to write all those "meh I hate those asking for homeworks" than actually replying... I'm new around here, so I don't know in what measure you get asked this stuff: I hope that by answering I won't cause a massive invasion of pupils willing to finish their duties quickly!

I think the OP is pretty confused about what RAM really is, so I'll try to make it a bit clearer, if I can

Last time I studied RAM architecture the book spoke about latches and nands circuits. It wasn't too hard to understand, although this technology has been supersteded when humanity got rid of manual switches to set bits.
All I can explain is that a nand latch can hold a bit (1 or 0) as long as it's not instructed to change it - that is, RAM needs to receive electricity in order to keep data, and you can only access it while it's not receiving maintenance charge. So, I think you can safely imagine that a nand circuit receives a signal that won't alter its content, say 11, then the system can send a signal to either alter or read its content, then it needs to wait for another refresh cycle. I might be wrong on some part (hopefully not completely), so probably someone could explain you this point better than this.
Anyways there are whole books on the subject, so a quick post is far from being exhaustive!

Video reproduction strictly depends on the software used - ideally you will have a circular buffer being read continously - that is, an amount of reserved RAM being continously overwritten right behind the reading position, so that on the next round shown pictures will be different and you only need a small limited amount of memory to show even a huge movie (that's what the prechache 2 seconds option in WinAmp and other players does, set the size of the ring, and why when your player freezes you hear the same piece of audio over and over, the buffer is not being refreshed anymore!).
That's just the final step, and displayed frame often resides on video memory. However the process is much more complicated as compression is taken into account - you need a buffer for storing data being decompressed, likely some temporary storage for decompression and finally a circular buffer for final display. Also, streamed videos like those on youtube might only exist in RAM.

The amount of RAM a program can use - people will correct me if I'm wrong - depends whether your software is running in protected mode or not, at least on intel processors. Also, the OS is an important factor: apparently, even the latest Windows won't allow an application to use more than 4 GB, although they might be running as 64bit apps (for 32 bit applications, in normal conditions you can only address 4 GB, and that's the limit of a 32 bit value, 2^32-1).

During file transfer, as someone already said it depends: a "normal" copy will be composed of a program loading data into a buffer and dumping it somewhere else, while other methods only rely on the drivers themselves. I'm not sure about DMA transfers, I might say it only uses controller's cache, but you can double check on wikipedia. Anyways as an example I'm reasonably sure that Nintendo DS' DMA copy doesn't use anything else other than source and destination locations (which may be on the cartidge).

Anyways programmers rarely have to worry about how electronics actually work, unless there is a special need. Most of the time you ask for a buffer and you're happy with it - you don't even know if it's in RAM, swap, VRAM or aonly-god-knows-where (thanks to M$, we have loads of C# gurus delivering critical apps and not even knowing what a cache hit is).

Hope I was of help!

King_DuckZ